Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival, A Memoir

Imagining Robert is an account of Robert Neugeboren's 30-year history of mental illness. In this moving memoir, his brother Jay describes the tragedy of psychosis and illustrates the redemptive power of writing. The author imagines his brother as two people--one hospitalized, the other communicative and lucid--and crafts a story of his brother's thoughts by weaving together Robert's exquisitely written letters about this unfolding family tragedy. The instability of the author's own children and his manipulative mother's affliction with Alzheimer's disease multiply the pressure he feels, threatening his own mental health. His careful words seem an attempt to organize the confusion around him. The imagined friendship with the brother he lovingly cares for serves as an important source of self-examination. Neugeboren's prose restores his brother's dignity by refusing to let the details of how Robert has suffered in psychiatric institutions go unrecorded.